Journal of Biotechnology & Biomaterials
Open Access

Research Article

The Emerging Bio-Refinery Industry Needs to Refine Lignin Prior to Use

¹Department of Forest Biomaterials and Department of Chemistry, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8005, USA

²Center of Excellence for Advanced Materials Research (CEAMR), King Abdulaziz University, P.O. Box 80203, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia

Corresponding Author:

Dimitris S Argyropoulos
Department of Forest Biomaterials and Department of Chemistry
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-8005, USA
Tel: 919-757-4143
E-mail: dsargyro@ncsu.edu

Received date: February 11, 2014; Accepted date: February 13, 2014; Published date: February 15, 2014

Citation: Argyropoulos DS (2014) The Emerging Bio-Refinery Industry Needs to Refine Lignin Prior to Use. J Biotechnol Biomater S6:e001. doi:10.4172/2155-952X.S6-e001

Copyright: © 2014 Argyropoulos DS. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

In a manner similar to crude oil, technical lignins need refining if their potential as reactive polyphenols of well-defined molecular weight polymers and oligomers is to be actualized. Our recent work has demonstrated that a continuum of narrow fractions can be isolated by the incremental addition of a non-polar solvent (hexanes) in a polar (acetone) solution of softwood wood kraft lignin